#postmodernism

(Vollmann as his cross-dressing alter-ego, Dolores. Image from powerHouse’s very own: The Book of Dolores.)

The New Republic has a great profile of the always fascinating William T. Vollmann up today. Love this first sentence: 

As for being suspected of being the Unabomber, William T. Vollmann was suspected of being the Unabomber. He discovered this accidentally, after he requested his FBI file, for a piece he was writing for Harper’s about privacy. His FBI file is 785 pages long; only 294 were released to him. When Vollmann first discovered he was a Unabomber suspect, he thought: “ ‘Wow, this is really fun!’ I bustled about telling all of my friends. Then I started reading more of it.” He’s still angry that the content of his fiction was marshaled against him. His novel Fathers and Crows, for instance, is about the clash between the Iroquois and the first French missionaries to what was then called Kebec. An FBI operative rather ambitiously deduced that its title had something to do with the “FC” the Unabomber was known to scrawl on his bombs. “Fathers and Crows,” Vollmann said incredulously, “which took place in seventeenth- century Canada. It was outside what’s now the U.S. in a time before there was the U.S. It was evenhanded, I thought, about Iroquois and Jesuits. [But] they were saying, since he supports the Iroquois torture of the missionaries, he’s clearly in favor of terrorism.” (Not everything the FBI said about him was unkind, or not exactly unkind: “By all accounts, VOLLMANN is exceedingly intelligent and possessed with an enormous ego.”)

For those of you who haven’t read Vollmann before, pickup Rainbow Stories and get the fuck ready. 

-Hal-